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Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

theguardian.com

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#51

I commend the bravery of the leaker/whistleblower and hope they can maintain their personal safety. It's time to expose the evil amongst the elite-- all the elite--once and for all.

Should it be limited to just elite or everyone all the way down? Not trolling you as it might sound but how do you draw lines between elite and not elite.

Well elite in financial sense since we talk about banks, doing unlawful financial operations. Its not a bank's role to investigate murders.

Poor can't do that much impactful financial crime, can they

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#52

> This article is a bit difficult to understand; there's a mixture of actual money laundering with the non-crime of "a really bad person has a bank account". There's a difficult and IMO increasingly urgent question here, of whether the banking system is a utility or something else. There's no whistleblowers from the electricity company, even though it literally kept the lights on for murderers and traffickers. Nobody…

Came here to post dsquared's comment. Compare and contrast this thread with the truckers one. We don't really want to force banks into some kind of ill-specified "account cancellation culture".

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#53

Money, liquidity, and fungibility is a public good, it has been (and still is) a waste of public and private resources to attempt to alter that reality. Although this isn't a popular or public opinion by the public or banks or politicians, it is also the reality for banks and their host governments, and all lip service otherwise is either a lie for data collection or simply fails spectacularly at actually preventing…

> it doesn't matter what anyone's background is, they can still access banking and pools of liquidity to move between assets and trade with others anyway.

Julian Assange & Wikleaks had no access to the banking system because a US politician asked the banks to refuse them service at a time when they had not been charged with any crime.

Whenever you see someone you "dislike" being dealt with in an extradjudicial manner just keep in mind that these are your rights that now don't matter.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#54
post #24

Switzerland is all about Neutrality What's the point of neutrality if you are gonna ignore it when it's convenient. There's a reason Switzerland held Jewish and Nazi gold alike.

This country should be heavily sanctioned by the international community. They actively pull in (tax) fraudsters and criminals.

just like: bigger half of Caribbean, City of London, all of the UK Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Singapore, Delaware (yes that's US) and many, many more.

Its a dumb approach, sold by populist politicians to less-than-bright voters before elections who want binary world and simple solutions to all their problems.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#55
post #18

covid ends. russia war begins. putin to discuss ceasfire. credit suisse expose. is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously.

> is there any connection between these events, or am i just taking the simulation hypothesis too seriously. While I don't know about the rest, Russia has been a neocon project for a long time. If Trump hadn't given them the shock of their lives by winning and then spent the next four years sucking all the oxygen out of Washington, Hillary would have granted their wish in 2017-18. Putin is no saint. But I think he is…

Putin is smart as hell, most probably sociopath on top. You don't get to be long term successful KGB apparatchik for nothing. The problem is, nobody who wants all that juicy freedom, democracy and other perks of good western life wants strong Russia, these things are exact opposites. Its by far the biggest actual threat to European democracy.

I come from country who was invaded by them in 1968 when we showed we may head towards democracy, and the Russian mentality remained the same since then.

Its sad germans as a nation are still heavily traumatized by what their ancestors did during WWII, and probably hell will freeze sooner than german army fighting, well anything. This leaves Europe severely weakened in eyes of nearby machos like Putin or Erdogan.

He could have built a fine prosperous empire that people are actually happy to live in. Instead, everything is worse and he just siphons tens of billions to same banks as discussed here via his buddies (UBS cough cough). It may be the Wag the Dog situation, but all above is still valid.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, I consider that cheap when HSBC subsequently laundered billions of dollars over the following decade after the PATRIOT Act. The same PATRIOT Act that wouldnt have flagged wire transfers the terrorists used even if it existed before 9/11. It's just an opportunistic data collection program on everyone else. With billions slipping through from any random branch manager at any bank anywhere, how many 9/11s is th…

I can't help but see KYC as a means for automated IRS cases. They are swamped and the basic associations from the new datasets are incredibly revealing.

That's because Congress and the Senate out of pure self interest have chosen to restrict the IRS funding for decades. If they had the balls to increase funding I have little doubt they would have found and retrieved taxes rightfully due to the government.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#57
post #46

Once again the leaker went to Süddeutsche Zeitung [1] and left his/her/their documents there. Panama papers [2] and Paradise papers [3] started there as well. I'm really wondering why that is. [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers

Well, by now they have a reputation: Leakers of high-profile cases can stay anonymous if they go to this newspaper.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#58

This whistleblower is taking substantial personal risk. The Swiss banking secrecy laws provide for 5 year prison terms for people leaking client-sensitive information and when I worked on sensitive things in Switzerland I had to sign a document setting out the penalties and saying that I understood that I was personally liable and could (and probably would) receive jail time for disclosing anything.

The whistleblower could just as easily be an employee of the Russian ФСБ or the US NSA as an employee of Credit Suisse, in which case they wouldn't be at much personal risk.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#59
post #34
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spend triple that on the social programs.

If you’re paying so much, why does it work so poorly, compared to Europe?

Because US political structures are designed in a way that discourages competence. We spend an insane amount on social services but nobody cares if they work, spend wisely or have an impact.

Re: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters, corrupt politicians

#60
post #5

People on HN often dismiss the "nothing to hide" argument as invalid when it comes to strong privacy rights, but... the fact remains that those who very much want to hide their illegal activities and ill-gotten gains are first in line to the banks/services with the strongest privacy guarantees (swiss banks, cryptocurrencies, e2e chat apps, etc). It's a hard problem and I don't think saying "oh well, having human traf…

Do you use HTTPS? SSH? A password manager? Everyone has something to hide -- it is a matter of how much and from who(m). In our world of Big Data/surveillance capitalism, I don't see how you could even argue against stronger privacy rights...

I have SSH on my servers for the same reason I have locks on my house. Not because I have stuff to hide, but because having stuff stolen costs me money, and SSH and locks are an inexpensive way of preventing stuff of mine from being stolen
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